Harry Styles released a new batch of pop songs to the masses. Harry stans have gone crazy, but I’m left wanting more.
Every 7 or 8 years, Rolling Stone magazine publishes a list of the Top 500 albums of all time. In 2020, they released a new version of the list. Some of the picks on the list left many scratching their head, but the inclusion of Harry Styles’ 2019 album Fine Line upset a lot of music reviewers.
Honestly, it didn’t bug me.
I really enjoyed the album. I wasn’t familiar with Styles’ solo work up until that point, and I was really impressed with the musicianship shown on a project from such a high profile pop star. Legitimately, my first thoughts after listening to the album were “the one direction guy made this?”
I’ve sung the praises of this album up and down since then. It certainly has its flaws, but in general it’s a really enjoyable pop record with some really energetic and impressive influences and stylistic choices. Needless to say, I was excited for Harry’s following project.
…Then the single dropped.
That’s probably a smidgen dramatic, the track As It Was isn’t bad at all. I think the big struggle I had with this song was how quickly it got old. The lead single to Harry’s last album was called Watermelon Sugar. Some have argued this with me, but I maintain that I could hear that track every day for the rest of my life. It’s a really fun summer jam and it has this undeniable energy.
This new album’s single As It Was doesn’t have that energy. It’s good though. I was a little worried though that this album wouldn’t live up to what I considered a high standard set by the last record. Interestingly, this was the only single released for this album prior to release. This is compared to the three singles released before the release of Fine Line.
I admire the faith in the lead single and the power of the hardcore Styles fans to promote the album, but it started becoming difficult getting excited about the album when all I had to get excited about was a song which I was already tired of.
When the album dropped, I waited a bit before digging into it myself to see how it was received. When those around me seemed to make up their minds, I took a listen myself and found myself having a similar reaction:
It’s alright.
There are some things to like. Despite the mocking of this track on social media, I actually really enjoyed the opening track Music For a Sushi Restaurant. It brings out that energy I was seeking, albeit with maybe a more artificial sound. Despite an admittedly corny sounding chorus infesting the entire track, we get a great burst of energy from Styles who scats and croons all over. The guitar which takes over the end of the track was a good touch as well.
The following track Late Night Talking sounds like it was made inside a test tube to reverse engineer a song for the radio. That’s not necessarily a bad thing either, I actually enjoy this track too. Something that I found was missing from this album though was a level of earnestness.
Not to belabor the point, but the last album felt so genuine. At moments, it did feel like Harry was pouring everything he had into the record. Songs like She, Falling, and Lights Up gave us intense moments from Harry that are sorely missed here. Harry’s House doesn’t feel lazy, but it does feel like Harry wrote some of these songs for nights where he’s hungover or tired.
Track three (Grapejuice) furthers this point with a laid-back track which doesn’t really go anywhere. At least with the first two tracks, it felt like Harry was talking about something. This track, on the other hand, feels kinda half formed. He has these metaphors and concepts but I don’t think they really land all that well. This is another track where sonically; it gets old really fast. It’s not a bad track, but it’s certainly perfectly mediocre.
That poses an interesting question: What is Harry Styles’ music about? Furthermore, does it need to be about anything?
Does it matter who the subject of Watermelon Sugar is? We get what he’s going for with the track and what he’s saying, so the details don’t confound us. Most pop songs exist in a vacuum, meaning that songs on an album don’t need to serve some greater meaning. Oftentimes, they really are just about a feeling. Love, jealousy, sorrow, lust, anger, etc. We don’t need a novel from Styles about what each song exactly means.
That being said, I found myself being uninterested in the tracks here much more than I would have been listening to Fine Line. It feels like Harry is trying to be more interesting and layered with his songwriting, but it results in a lot of cases in songs feeling like nothing. A combination of uninspired vocal performances and (at times) nothing lyrics has led me to question whether or not I even like Styles at all.
This may feel like an overreaction after four tracks, but this complaint only gets stronger as the album continues. The track Cinema is clearly trying to be this sexy jam, but the concept in itself is really lame. The idea is that he is so interested in this woman physically, he compares her to a movie. The song itself doesn’t expand upon this idea of Cinema, but rather stays within the mind of Styles while telling this girl this.
Keep Driving has all of these words. There’s certainly a bunch of words here. For some reason, I cannot manage to care about anything he’s saying. Even as he transitions from talking about breakfast to talking about hard drugs, I can’t manage to care. I just don’t believe him. I don’t care what he was shooting for, it doesn’t resonate with me.
His thoughts don’t leave much to be desired.
The track Daydreaming seems to shoot more for the pop formula. There’s not a hook, but rather a big line which leads into an instrumental section with some vocal shots from Harry and the backing vocalists. It’s probably my favorite vocal performance from Harry on the record as it feels like he’s really flexing his frontman chops here, hitting some really sweet notes and a big scream near the end.
Besides Harry himself, he’s backed by a band shooting for a bedroomy take on Harry’s usual pop. We get more synthesizers (along with a really farty bass which distracts the hell out of me on tracks like Love of My Life). It does, at points, feel like a DIY record. To be fair, this is his first full length project since The Pandemic began, so maybe these tracks were written with a smaller band in mind. That being said, I just don’t appreciate the sound we get on this record.
Harry’s voice feels like it’s being hindered almost by the production. On some tracks, it sounds so quiet that it’s almost buried. Evenin his most passionate moments (which there are shockingly few of), he feels stifled for some reason.
Nobody expected the instrumentation to break any ground (considering it’s a laundry list of session musicians) but at times, it feels really boring.
Verdict: This is a hard album to pin down. To be honest, I think it’ll be years before I’ll be able to view this album objectively. To me, it’s such a major step down from his previous work. It’s not even a bad album either, it just has way too many mediocre facets. Harry’s lackluster lyrics and often sleepy vocals can’t hold up the duller moments on this record and detract from the more fun pop songs.
The only songs I see myself going back to in the future are Music For a Sushi Restaurant, Late Night Talking, Matilda, and Daydreaming. The rest ranges from mediocre to decent, but the decent tracks don’t have a whole lot of replay value. It’s not a horrific listen, but I cannot recommend it.